bility to discuss it
intelligently. Your story is the most marvelous of anything I have ever
heard. I feel quite sure that it must be strictly true, yet I can
scarcely comprehend it. A host of questions arise in my mind, which I
wish to ask, if I may be permitted. When you heard the voice from the
trumpet, how could you feel so sure it was your father speaking? That he
had been swallowed up by the sea? That the shipwreck had really
occurred?"

"I do not wonder at your questions, Mr. Flagg," said Fern Fenwick, "I
will gladly answer as best I can. Without considering or discussing the
fact that the crucial test of identity was disclosed by almost every
word which my father uttered, yet I could not for a moment doubt his
presence. I knew he was there. I recognized every intonation of the
voice. I felt the identity of his spiritual personality, radiant with
the silent force of his love for me, quite as plainly as though at that
moment his physical personality had entered the room. My experience
after my mother's transition, the development of my mediumship, and my
increased sensitiveness to the presence of spiritual entities, no doubt
aided me greatly. At that time I perceived and recognized without
question, that life in the physical is but the expression of the spirit,
or Ego; that after the passing of the physical, the Ego inherits and
possesses immortality as a conscious individual entity, clothed with a
spiritual body, perfectly fitted for its continued existence in the
realms of the world of spirit; that, through the action of a natural
law, the law of mediumship, such spirits can and do, come to and
communicate with their friends and loved ones in earth life. All these
things, I knew my father understood clearly, therefore I was prepared to
accept the verity of his spiritual presence as readily as I would any
other phenomenon of nature. In conclusion, I may as well tell you at
this point, that the letter referred to by father as having been written
by him in Alaska on December fifth, together with my conference in San
Francisco, some months later, with Dewitt C. Dunbar; the arrival in port
at that time of a China steamer, bringing the mate and four sailors as
sole survivors from the wreck of the ill-fated steamer, and my interview
with them, all confirmed, in every particular, the truth of the
statements concerning the matter, which were made by my spirit father,
just after his passage through the gateway of death fr